Change natural in education
Recently, Taipei First Girls’ High School Chinese literature teacher Alice Ou (區桂芝) criticized the de-emphasizing of classical Chinese in the 2019 curriculum guidelines, triggering a wide debate about desinicization.
When I was teaching Chinese in 1988, the curriculum stipulated that junior and high-school students practice calligraphy every week, while annotations for the selected Chinese readings in the textbook (classical and vernacular Chinese alike) had to be classical Chinese. Would it satisfy Ou if our curriculum returns to such a state?
Desinicization is like a political spectrum. There is the far left wing on one side, but there is also the center left. Not one single individual or group can monopolize the idea of desinicization.
There are complex reasons behind people’s behavior. Focusing on a single reason for a problem oversimplifies things. Since former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) came to office, no one can ignore that corruption has been falling, while several desinicization measures have been put into effect.
Could we say that this is because government officials have been studying less of the ancient Chinese classics known as the Four Books and Five Classics?
Few people would realize that Taiwanese are the Chinese-speaking ethnic group that has read the most classical Chinese, in terms of the number of texts, percentage and diversity. Many classical Chinese works in textbooks were not studied by ancient Chinese. After all, the percentage of literate people (those who can recognize 500 Chinese characters) in the Qin Dynasty was in the low-single-digit percentage. Those who were literate and could also read classical Chinese were the select few.
If we use Ou’s standard, then well over 90 percent of people in the Qin Dynasty lived under conditions of desinicization. The literati, according to The Scholars (儒林外史) and Hu Shih’s (胡適) Autobiography at Forty (四十自述), studied Confucian classics.
As a result, I have full confidence in saying that before the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) made Honesty and Morality (廉恥) a selected reading, not more than one in a thousand Chinese had studied it.
Further, according to Chinese reformer Liang Qichao’s (梁啟超) the Intellectual History of China Since the 17th Century (中國近三百年學術史), only a handful of intellectuals would study the ancient Chinese philosophical texts on Taoism, legalism and Mohism, not to mention the Chinese encyclopedia The Exploitation of the Works of Nature (Tiangong Kaiwu, 天工開物), which the current curriculum has included or listed as supplementary materials.
In 1905, Empress Dowager Cixi (慈禧太后) of the Qing Dynasty abolished the Imperial Examination System, and the Taiwanese government abolished the subject of Three Principles of the People in 1995.
Modern people must have considered those debates meaningless. The same should be said of the current debate on the selection of Honesty and Morality.
Liu Tien-hsiang
Tainan
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